The Turntable

One of the things I inherited from my dad was his interest in stereos. An engineer, he prided himself on having high-end equipment and a collection of popular music from the early 1960s – Patti Page, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, people like that. I remember when my Uncle Harley died, my dad took possession of a speaker system in a massive mahogany cabinet – it must have been three feet across, three feet deep and four feet high – that was shaped to fit in the corner of a room. Dad somehow managed to hang it from the top of the staircase so it was optimally positioned to blast “A Taste of Honey” into the living room to balance another very large speaker on the room’s far side.

When I was a teenager I had a good stereo system too. Back then, a stereo consisted of an amplifier and tuner, speakers the size of luggage, and a turntable and cartridge, which featured a needle with a diamond stylus. Very 20^th Century.

I also had a big and growing record collection: almost every Beatles album, The Who, Rolling Stones, Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, Little Feat, Eric Clapton, and many, many others.

 Of course, when I entered college, I took it all with me. Clothes? A few pairs of jeans and some polos. Furniture? Something to hold the records. A desk lamp that I still have in my study. But mainly my music.

I did some dumb things in college, including (but certainly not limited to) selling off some of my LPs for beer money. I still have a couple hundred records from that time, but gone are those by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, and other artists.

The stereo components – and my records – lasted through college and into my adulthood, but once Donna and I started a family, my interest in music took a decided back seat to raising kids and my career. I replaced the big JBL speakers to what would fit in a small apartment otherwise furnished with real tables, chairs, bookcases and toys. I continued to play music occasionally, but didn’t buy many albums; my record collection today is a time capsule of the late sixties to the mid-eighties.

A few years ago my turntable – a Dual model with a wood base from the early 1970s – died. The rubber band that connects the drive capstan to the turntable disintegrated. I wondered if it was time to get rid of my albums and move on. Out of laziness, they remained in the darkest confines of our basement.

When we moved my mom from her independent living apartment to a smaller unit a couple summers ago, my family undertook the massive project of figuring out what of her possessions she would have room to keep, and what to do with the rest. Our kids took some of her furniture; Donna and I took a couple pieces, along with photo albums, sentimental items like heirloom dishes and Dad’s nameplate from work, and put some of her stuff in our basement for storage. I also took Dad’s amplifier and tuner. He didn’t have a turntable – his records had gone by the wayside decades ago. The rest of Mom's things were donated or trashed.

I recently had been thinking again of getting rid of my albums. But looking through them, they brought back fond memories of dorm room parties and crabs and lacrosse on the quad with those big JBLs pointed out the window while Van Morrison boomed out in his incoherent, plaintiff voice. Maybe I shouldn’t throw them out after all.

For my birthday last month Donna gave me a turntable. It took me almost two hours to hook it up in the cabinet that now housed Dad’s components – stereo cabinets really shouldn’t have backs on them. I got it working, and started breaking out some old records – Sgt. Pepper, Leon Russell’s Carney, a nice Rod Stewart album called Atlantic Crossing that has a fast side for parties and a slow one for just listening to.

I’m really enjoying this gift of looking backward a little, reminiscing, and hearing some good, old music.